Freescale Combines Vehicle Sensors With Tower System
10/11/2011
The image above shows an MMA6800 sensor board as it connects to a TWR-SENSOR board that in turn plugs into a Tower bus "elevator" board that stacks boards in a vertical stack.
Hi, Jim. Cypress takes the plug-in approach with its PSoC products and Microchip offers PICtail plug-in modules for its dev boards. Other MCU and even uP vendors have similar modular approaches. Like you, I remember the days of the expensive boards. Companies with big budgets might not balk at costly dev kits, but entrepreneurs who have cool ideas can't afford them just to test a concept. --Jon
This is a nice step in the right direction; first, with respect to the modular approach for design flexibility, and second, the low, low prices! It wasn’t long a go (circa 2002) that evaluation boards for the popular OMAP processors from Texas Instruments ran into multiple thousands of dollars for only a single Eval-Kit. (OK, so, granted the OMAP is a uP, and we’re talking sensors here, but the cost difference is remarkable!) And the modular approach is a great help for development engineers also. Final product layout always risks last-minute revisions, due to performance degradation from shields and other variables not considered on the bench-boards. Kudos to Freescale for addressing these two points.
The Machinist Calc Pro computes speeds and feed rates for milling, turning, and drilling: cutting speed, spindle speed, feed rate (inches/minute), cutting feed, etc.
During a recent meeting with engineering-school faculty and alumni, Contributing Technical Editor Jon Titus talked about whether colleges should educate generalists or specialists. What do you think?
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